points and to "recoup" by charging excessive rates at non-competitive
points. Every encouragement was thus given by the railroads to the
Granger movement, which spread in less than two years over the whole
Northwest.

In the fall of 1873 Iowa elected a Granger legislature, like Minnesota,
Wisconsin and Illinois. The wildest predictions were made by railroad
men as to the extremes to which the Granger legislature would go, but it
confined itself to enacting a law establishing an official
classification and fixing maximum rates for all railroad companies. The
law was approved March 23, 1874, and went into effect on the 4th of July
following. This law in no case compelled companies to carry freight at a
lower rate than they had voluntarily carried it in the past. Many of the
rates in force at the time of the passage of the act were considerably
lower than the corresponding maximum rates fixed by the legislature. The
average rates fixed by the law were higher than the rates at which the
railroads had previously carried a large portion of corresponding
freight. The revenues of the road were not even curtailed by this law;
on the contrary, by equalizing rates, _i. e._, by leveling up the rates
given to favored places and favored individuals and leveling down the
exorbitant rates exacted from the public at non-competitive points, the
railroad companies were enabled to effect an increase in their total
revenue.

The Granger law remained in force until 1878. Its constitutionality was
tested by the railroad companies in the Supreme Court of the United
States, but this high tribunal held that rate-making was a legislative
and not a judicial function, that it was within the province of the
State legislature to prescribe rates for the transportation of
passengers and freight wholly within the State, and that for protection
against abuses by legislatures the people must resort to the polls, and
not to the courts.

The Granger laws have been and are still severely criticised by those
opposed to the principle of State control and by the ignorant. It is
nevertheless true that those laws were moderate, just and reasonably
well adapted to remedy the evils of which the public complained. It has
been the policy of most railroad men to attack them as crude, intensely
radical and socialistic. The obloquy heaped upon them was the work of
designing men who desired to continue their impositions upon the people.
Mr. Charles Francis Adams, howe